BIDI and Internationalization

BIDI support may require some kind of "if BIDI" in all web pages at
the cost of higher CPU or otherwise - duplicate web pages. For
example, labels and menus should be on the right side in all BIDI web
forms, while "western" pages have such elements on the left.

It happen that mostly we expand to the "western" world. I believe that
i18n development in Russian or German will cost us a number of times
less than the BIDI. I think the ROI of the BIDI is too low to develop
and host BIDI web services of some Israeli firms. We expect more
customers in Moscow (10 M citizens) and other big cities than in the
whole Israel (6 M). Opinions?

1. I'm just curious, no one use internationalization library?
Sun/Jakarta JSTL, Jakarta i18n, etc? Any successful stories?

Evgeny Gesin /Javadesk/
Saturday, October 18, 2003

The viability of internationalization depends very much on what you are selling:

Some sectors in Israel (Financial, Technical for example), are fluent enough in English that any investment in a BIDI web site for them probably won't pay off.

BIDI also means Arabic and Urdu (If I'm not mistaken), and there are many millions of people who speak these languages and are not fluent enough in English, or even have access to the Internet.

So the demographic you should be after is not how many people are in the country, but how many of your potential customers have the need for the translation.

And remember that to some people, an incomlpete / unprofessional translation looks much much worse than no translation at all.

Ori Berger
Saturday, October 18, 2003

  Recent Topics

  Fog Creek Home